About the Author:

David Turover is a computer nerd, a scifi/fantasy/anime
fan, a recovering video game addict, weilder of a 3-digit kuro5hin.org ID,
the author of cshoot, and an Eagle Scout.
He studies Computer Information Science at Santa
Rosa Junior College in California and plans to eventually transfer to
a university CS program. While looking
for paying work, he volunteers his spare time as a database developer and
GIS technician for the County of Sonoma.

David has been a close follower of national politics since
he became old enough to vote, and he sometimes contributes his opinions
to Live From the Nuke Free Zone.

Warrior Cecrops Tangaroa

played by: David Turover

In 1997, Warrior Cecrops Tangaroa was just
a high school senior in Petaluma, California when he attracted the attention
of the Brothers of Grimace, who noticed in him the potential to become a powerful
mage. Faced with increasing Lyran activity in the region, the Brothers decided
to push Tangaroa into the Jihad before the Lyrans -- with their mind-control
powers and advanced magic skills -- could get ahold of him. They did this
the soft way, leaving propaganda lying around where he would see it and holding
conversations where he could overhear them. To this day, Tangaroa thinks he
discovered the Jihad and not the other way around.

The newly recruited Dobermensch had been in the Jihad for a total of two
days before running into a small Spongin battle group. Looking to serve his
new Cause, he singlehandedly wiped them out with their own weapons after disarming
one with a punch. In the official Empire records, this victory secured his
entry into the Empire as an officer, Trooper Cecrops, rather than as an enlisted
man; but due to his powers and the Brothers' desire to keep him close enough
to be controlled, he had already been inducted with this rank and name.

Cecrops nearly met his end that day. After the battle, he was set upon by
a juvenile Saethrian that had been a Lyran gift to the the Spongins' Wyrm
Minion leader for past successes. When Cecrops faced death, his previously
unknown-to-him powers emerged to halt the creature's attack and lead him to
victory.

After serving in a few Operations where Cecrops's powers and weaknesses were
tested, and the finding that one of his weaknesses was an inability to control
any more than a fragment of his power, Cecrops was directed towards more behind-the-scenes
work: managing Jihad-Mundane relations, clearing up evidence behind Operations,
and searching the Mundane media for signs of new Spongin activity in the days
before VRDET's SpongeScope network rendered this activity obsolete.

Cecrops was quickly promoted to Warrior, granted the new name Tangaroa, and
assigned to coordinate DobIntell activities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and
Northeast Asia, areas which had been relatively quiet and where his handlers
assumed he should not be discovered by the Lyrans. To his watchers' distress,
Tangaroa often kept these regions quiet by personally stamping out any hotspots
of Spongin activity.

Tangaroa also pioneered increased coordination with Mundane contacts, sometimes
hiring mercenaries to back him up in assaults and seeking compensation from
Mundane establishments for eliminating Spongin threats to them. His innovative
methods drew the attention of Dobintell director Windigo, who unexpectedly
dropped in one day to personally review his procedures and just as suddenly
left after Tangaroa demonstrated how he kept a strict separation between Jihad
and Mundane activities, always keeping his contacts in the dark on everything
and never using Jihad resources (including himself) for purely Mundane purposes.

For being a spy, Tangaroa is unusually honest, preferring to phrase his words
to avoid telling a lie than to tell a falsehood. Although having such honor
in that one aspect of his life, Tangaroa has little honor on the battlefield,
using any kind of trickery to avoid a fair fight. His personality is that
of a quiet ruminator, thinking over situations and evelopments
and usually having a decent plan for anything that comes up.